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Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.
A new book out this week tells the story of the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of the many victims of the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Giuffre took her own life earlier this year. Her posthumous memoir explores her resilience, while also revealing new details about the abuse she suffered at the hands of powerful figures, as well as newly surfaced allegations of mistreatment by her husband.
And a warning:
This report includes accounts of sexual abuse and suicide.
Most of the world came to know Virginia Roberts Giuffre in 2011, when she began speaking out about the abuse she endured at the hands of some of the world’s most powerful men. In court filings, Giuffre described being sexually abused and trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein when she was as young as 16 years old.
Giuffre spoke after his death, continuing to demand justice.
I want to start by saying it’s not how Jeffrey died, but it’s how he lived. And we need to get to the bottom of everybody who was involved with that, starting with Ghislaine Maxwell and going along the lines there.
I was recruited at a very young age from Mar-a-Lago and entrapped in a world that I didn’t understand. And I have been fighting that very world to this day, and I won’t stop fighting. I will never be silenced until these people are brought to justice.
Giuffre led the way for many more women to come forward about their own abuse by Epstein and those around him. In April of this year, Giuffre died by suicide in Australia, where she lived for many years with her husband and three children. She was just 41 years old.
Giuffre’s story is told now in a new posthumous memoir titled “Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice,” a collaboration with journalist Amy Wallace.
So you spent four years working closely with Virginia on this book. Why did she want to write it? What’s the message she wanted to send with this?
And so she wanted to depict herself sort of warts and all, highs and lows.
Amna Nawaz:
It’s an absolutely unflinching and haunting account of what she lived through, especially her years as a child, I think detailing all of the sexual abuse she went through at the hands of her own father, which he denies, being trafficked to her father’s friend, which she details being raped by two teenagers later, by strangers after she runs away first from her own home and then from an abusive group home, all before she was even 16 years old.
What was it like for her to relive all of those moments and retell them to you?
Amy Wallace:
Well, it was obviously very difficult. There was a decision she had to make.
In the past, she had always said truthfully, I was abused in my childhood by a family friend. That was true. And that person is in the book.
But what she hadn’t said was she was also abused by her own father. And that was a decision that she made to decide to go there. Sort of the precipitating event is this idea that victims of sexual trafficking are not born. They are made, and they are made through terrible experience. And so she would say to me: “How can I go after or try to point the finger at all of these men I have been trafficked to, boldfaced names, when I won’t even talk about the person who originally hurt me?”
And who arguably made her more vulnerable to being hurt throughout her life, because she had had these early experiences. It was painful, but it was — she felt like it was necessary.
Amna Nawaz:
You know, she’s allegedly being abused by her own father and she tries to tell other people about it. They’re at a family excursion on a big family camping trip. And in front of extended family, she confronts her father about this. She says what he’s been doing, and no one reacts.
